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‘Unfit for the position’: Acting BLM chief won’t get the permanent post — but he’ll stay on the job


By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory August 17, 2020

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This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.

William Perry Pendley, the embattled attorney who is acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, is out as a candidate for the permanent job.

Trump withdrew Pendley’s nomination on Saturday because it could have caused problems for three Republican senators in tough re-election races who would have voted whether to confirm him: Steve Daines of Montana, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona. He is expected to remain as acting director.

“President Trump’s Senate Republican allies appear uncomfortable voting to confirm such a controversial nominee,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “They should be similarly uncomfortable with allowing Pendley to keep working for the federal government.”

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat who is running against Daines, filed one of two federal lawsuits about Pendley’s appointment. Bullock’s lawsuit says Pendley is violating the Federal Vacancies Reform Act which prohibits acting officers from running agencies while their nominations are pending before the Senate.

The Western Watersheds Project, an environmental watchdog, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, also sued over Pendley’s appointment. Both cases are pending.

In July 2019, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt appointed Pendley acting director. Trump nominated Pendley to become director of the bureau in June.

The bureau oversees 247 million acres of public land, roughly the size of Texas and California combined, more land than any other federal agency. The bureau has not had a Senate-confirmed director since Trump took office.

All 45 of the Senate’s Democrats and the two independents wrote Trump in August, asking him to withdraw the nomination, saying he was “unfit for the position.”

Pendley previously ran Mountain States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for private property rights, and sued the Interior Department, which he is now a part of, at least 40 times. Pendley also worked under James Watt in the early 1980s as deputy assistant secretary of the Minerals Management Service.

Pendley pushed for a fire sale of coal leases in that job which led to a federal probe in which he was referred for possible criminal prosecution. No charges were ever filed.

In November, he publicly undermined the agency’s rangers, writing in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they should defer to local law enforcement. His words could lead to potentially violent confrontations with bureau employees who routinely face threats, harassment and violence from people upset about restrictions on public land.

CONSERVATION
Mining Deep Sea Vents Could Put Precious Ecosystems At Risk

Dharna Noor
8/08/20 10:00AM

The deep sea is one of the least understood places on Earth. Among its oddities are hydrothermal vents, cracks in the seafloor that pump out scaldingly hot water and form massive chimneys teeming with weird microbial life.

What we do know about this mysterious ecosystem is that there are enormous deposits of rare earth minerals down there, including tellurium, cadmium, lithium, zinc, and cobalt. These minerals are used to produce technology such as cell phones and renewable energy as well as cancer treatment drugs. Our future hinges on them.

Right now, the mineral content of these hydrothermal vents is untapped with all rare earth mining taking place above the ocean waves on land. But with demand for these technologies increasing, countries around the world are lining up to begin extracting these precious minerals from the seafloor, including from the striking vents.

Hydrothermal vents mark the cracks in the seafloor where tectonic plates spread apart and hot magma poured out, forming new seafloor and creating giant, chimney-like openings which spew out hot water. That water is full of minerals pulled from deep beneath the seafloor, which solidify when they hit the cold water of the deep sea. That means the vents’ mineral contents are significant. Scientists believe just one vent could provide enough zinc to supply the entire country of Japan’s demand for a year. The ecological impacts of extracting all these elements, however, is poorly understood. That’s especially true of inactive vents that have ridden the tectonic plates away from the magma-heated water, which are even less studied than active ones.

The tectonic plates are, of course, in motion. As they move, they eventually push active vents further away from the spaces between the plates, depriving them of super heated water. That’s when they become inactive.

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The studies that have been done on the impacts of deep sea mining show that it could seriously threaten biodiversity and disturb microbes that sequester greenhouse gases like carbon and methane, which could potentially have negative consequences for the climate crisis. Scientists have also found that if the regions are dredged up for minerals, they may not recover for millions of years.

Last year, a team of scientists with Sylvan Geomicrobiology Lab’s Hot2Cold Vents exploration project boarded a submarine and journeyed to the bottom of the ocean to learn more about the unique formations. Jason Sylvan, a principal investigator on the project and microbiologist at Texas A&M University, focused his research on inactive vents.

“[Inactive vents] are the types of systems where there is an interest in seafloor mining because of the high amounts of metals that are present,” he said. “They’re kind of of interest for targeting because they’re thought to be less likely to contain unique biology, but the truth is we just haven’t studied them very much at all.”

Sylvan and his colleagues collected footage and data of the deep sea wonders to better understand how they change as they become inactive, and determine how quickly they could recover from mineral extraction. He found that understanding the processes is complicated, because mining one vent could have implications for other ones, too.

“The connectivity in the subsurface between these different sites—so more or less the plumbing underneath the sciences—is very difficult to study and so not super well understood,” he said.

Until researchers learn enough about the complex vents on the bottom of the oceans, Sylvan says he’d recommend companies stay away from mineral extraction down there. And he’s not alone—proposed deep sea mining projects have been cancelled due in part to environmental concerns.

“I would say I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said.
Dharna Noor
Staff writer, Earther

Watch this video on The Scene.

You Can Mark 'Fire Tornado' Off Your 2020 Apocalypse Bingo Card

Alyse Stanley
Saturday 9:22PM 15/8/2020
•
Filed to:FIRENADO

The Loyalton Fire currently raging in California, as seen in this one-hour timelapse, produced a fiery vortex on Saturday, leading the National Weather Service to issue its first-ever tornado warning for a twister spawned by fire.Gif: CAL Fire

Apparently running out of cataclysmic events to throw at us this year, Mother Nature decided to reach deep into her bag of tricks and pull out a Biblical classic: swirling hellfire.

The National Weather Service issued its first-ever tornado warning for a twister spawned by fire early Saturday afternoon after a wildfire in Northern California produced a towering, flaming vortex. While not unheard of, fire tornadoes are some of the rarest weather phenomena on Earth, and meteorologists are saying this is the first time one’s received an official tornado warning.

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The NWS Reno office issued a warning for residents in Lassen County, California shortly after 6 p.m. ET on Saturday after a pyrocumulonimbus cloud “capable of producing a fire induced tornado” emerged from a wildfire in nearby Loyalton. Officials also cautioned people to stay clear of the eastern Sierra Valley and issued evacuation orders to several of the surrounding communities.



Onlookers shared footage of the blazing vortex online, and it is nothing short of terrifying. The images looks like something more at home in a blockbuster disaster flick than a newsreel. In the image of the reported scene on the ground shared below, the towering cloud kicked up by the Loyalton Fire dyes the sunlight orange while obscuring the mountains. The outlines of the firenado rising over the landscape are clear, though, amid the chaos. Other images shared on Twitter appear to confirm the tornado on the ground, swirling and sucking smoke up into the sky.

The Loyalton Fire, which remains largely uncontained as of Saturday evening, has been burning since Friday and has reportedly grown to more than 2,000 acres. Freakishly hot weather responsible for rolling blackouts across California along with gusty winds and dry conditions have allowed the flames to spread rapidly. These types of conditions are becoming more common due to the climate crisis, leading to larger and more destructive wildfires across the West. Despite that, firenados remain thankfully rare (for now).

Only a few fiery vortices have ever been recorded, including 2018's Carr Fire. What went on to become one of California’s most destructive and largest fires on record also spawned a firenado with winds of 143 mph (230 kph) and killed at least one firefighter. Their rarity has made them somewhat of a mystery.

Exactly how a fire tornado becomes, well, a firenado is still an area of very active research. What scientists do know, though, is that a key part of the formula to spin up a firenado is that a wildfire has to be monstrous enough to essentially form its own weather system. When that happens, pyrocumulous clouds and pyrocumulonimbus thunderclouds form as the hot air rises above the flames and goes through the cycle of cooling and condensing in the upper atmosphere.

They Want to Break You

A few weeks ago, I received an email threatening to abduct me off the street, cut my balls off, and Read more

What happens next, though, is what researchers are still trying to work out. One theory is that if those updrafts of superheated air rise and rotate, you get a spinning whirl of fire and smoke stretching into the sky. Another possibility is that an area of horizontal rotating wind due to the turbulence near the ground gets swept up and tilted vertically. Good on the scientists for working to figure this out, but either way, it’s safe to say you don’t want to be anywhere near a firenado when it forms.

The National Weather Service’s Reno office later announced on Twitter that the fire tornado had weakened by around 7 p.m. ET, though it warned that “extreme fire behavior” will continue into the evening as gusts are expected to remain in excess of 60 mph (97 kph).

Alyse Stanley
Gizmodo weekend editor. Freelance games reporter. Full-time disaster bi.

Marge Simpson Scolds Trump Adviser Jenna Ellis for Kamala Harris Dig (Video)

Trump adviser's remark draws rebuke from Marge Simpson 01:23

(CNN)

Doh! Politics have really gotten serious when a beloved but fictional animated character feels compelled to defend herself against a real-world slight.

Jenna Ellis, Trump campaign adviser and lawyer, recently trolled presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris by saying her voice sounded like the character of Marge Simpson on the long-running animated series "The Simpsons."

On Friday, the show's verified Twitter account tweeted a video of Marge's response.

Marge Simpson has something to say. pic.twitter.com/viux96bAPf

— TheSimpsons (@TheSimpsons) August 14, 2020

"I teach my children not to name call, Jenna." Watch Marge Simpson deliver a direct response to Trump adviser Jenna Ellis' comment that Kamala Harris sounds like her. https://cnn.it/2Y39Nu0

"I usually don't get into politics, but the president's senior adviser Jenna Ellis just said Kamala Harris sounds like me," the character said, explaining that Lisa, one of the children on the show, told her. "Lisa said she doesn't mean it as a compliment."

Marge Simpson added that as an "ordinary suburban housewife," she was "starting to feel a little disrespected."

"I teach my children not to name call Jenna," Marge admonished. "I was gonna say I'm pissed off, but I'm afraid they'd bleep it."

"The Simpsons" have parodied many times Donald Trump over the years and the show is even sometimes credited with predicting his presidency.

Actress Julie Kavner voices the character of the often very sweet and laid-back Marge SImpson.

Almost 30 years ago, Madonna perfectly predicted the ageism she faces in the music industry today

Posted 2 days ago by James Besanvalle in news

Madonna has been releasing music for almost 40 years and her latest collaboration with Dua Lipa, Missy Elliott and The Blessed Madonna is just one more notch to add to her belt.

But when Lipa dropped the remix version of her song “Levitating” on Friday, Madonna became the predictable target for tired tropes about her age.

Some people on social media unfairly slammed the 61-year-old (62 on Sunday!) music icon as “old”:


But this criticism is something she’s had to deal with for more than 25 years.

In an interview with Jonathan Ross on Channel 4 in 1992, the “Vogue” singer was just 34 years old at the time.

Ross asked:

Do you think perhaps that you will be someone who will challenge this kind of taboo of women losing their sexuality or not being seen as sexual animals as much when they get past 40?

Madonna shot back:

I think that not only do we suffer from racism and sexism, but we also suffer from ageism. And that is that once you reach a certain age, you're not allowed to be adventurous, you're not allowed to be sexual and I think that's rather hideous.

I mean a lot of people have said, ‘Oh, that's so pathetic, I hope she's not still doing that in 10 years’, I mean, who cares? What if I am? I mean, Is there a rule?

What are you just supposed to die when you're 40? That's basically what everybody wants people to do. I think it's stupid. Put yourself out to pasture? Why? Life is long – people are living to be 100 years old – I don't get it.


Unfortunately, she's still keenly aware about the ageist critics today. In an interview with Vogue last year, Madonna said:

People have always been trying to silence me for one reason or another, whether it’s that I’m not pretty enough, I don’t sing well enough, I’m not talented enough, I’m not married enough, and now it’s that I’m not young enough.

So they just keep trying to find a hook to hang their beef about me being alive on. Now I’m fighting ageism, now I’m being punished for turning 60.

Don't let the haters get you down, Madge – you're a trailblazer.

The GOP can’t control QAnon because the party was already becoming a conspiracy cult

August 16, 2020 David Atkins, The Washington Monthly Commentary

Trump supporters in Tulsa, AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

SOCIAL SPREADERS

At long last, mainstream reporters are starting to take the QAnon conspiracy cult seriously. With at least one QAnon devotee about to be elected to Congress, millions of online followers and several big stories in major publications, the cult has come into its own. Pushback against it has come too little, too late. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok only recently started deactivating major QAnon promoters and groups, even as those accounts engage in coordinated ban evasion and continue to peddle lies on other platforms.

I (as others have) use the word “cult” here very intentionally. QAnon is not a political movement centered around an ideology or policy platform: it is a freewheeling grab bag of mostly far-right but also non-partisan conspiracy theories from flat-earthers to believers in lizard people to those who believe that JFK Jr is still alive and coordinating the arrests of a massive global pedophile and Satanic child sacrifice ring. Its adherents demand not allegiance to a specific orthodoxy, but only blind faith in the leader: an anonymous online figure nicknamed “Q” who began posting on 4chan during the early days of the Trump Administration, claiming to be a member of the administration with top “Q” level security clearance (no such clearance actually exists.) Members spend countless hours analyzing specific “drops” from Q, using numerology and other hokey deep reading techniques to parse misspelling in Trump tweets for hidden messages and patterns, fitting them into bizarre and hopelessly complicated “calendars” and “clocks.”

The key catchphrases of the movement are typical of cultic in-groups with political overtones. “Trust the Plan.” “Patriots Are in Control.” “Where We Go One We Go All.” It provides a built-in community of fellow believers, and a chiliastic all-encompassing spiritual battle against both human and supernatural enemies. As with an adventist cult, Q followers are supposed to be essential team members laying the groundwork for the exposure of the “truth”: a giant global ring of child-eating Satanist pedophiles restricting access to free energy, debt jubilees and world peace. Central to all of this is the figure of Donald Trump, who will supposedly one day bring “the pain”: the mass arrest and summary execution of all the cult’s enemies, ranging from standard right-wing targets like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. (The fact that President Trump, leader of the Executive Branch of the United States, has supposedly allowed this ring to exist unhampered for nearly four years while an anonymous 8chan user spreads the gospel is dismissed as a minor inconvenience.) All of it is overlaid on existing white supremacist and anti-semitic themes, as the enemy is supposed to be a “globalist” cabal using minorities to overwhelm majority-white Christian nations.

QAnon followers are also suffering the same sorts of social isolation and estrangement from family and friends that is typical of new cult members. QAnon leaders, for their part, offer a substitute family for them in replacement. As QAnon influencer Martin Geddes once tweeted before his account was suspended:

“Part of the struggle of being “awake(ish)” is that many of your normal sources of support become flimsy or even can attack. Your preacher, teacher, therapist, mother, lover etc can be under the spell of false narratives or devious doctrines. Requires building a whole new network.”

This is not a political movement. It is a novel form of online religion enabled by social media algorithms. And it is deeply dangerous, not just because of its capacity for catapulting all sorts of misinformation but also because of its natural tendency toward political violence. After all, if you believed that such things were true and such people existed, what would you do to stop them?

One would think that the Republican Party would see the danger of this phenomenon and try to nip it in the bud, as surely as any political entity would try to quell a cult growing like a cancer within it. But it hasn’t. House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has come under fire for not doing enough to stop QAnon within Republican circles and hewing too close to Trump, but he is unlikely to be seriously threatened for leadership. Trump himself refuses to try to squelch the conspiracy group, seeing any supporter as a good supporter.

The problem is that Republican Party has been relying on only slightly milder forms of conspiratorial politics for years now. It’s staggering to ponder the implications of modern Republican ideology all at once, but consider a few examples. To be a modern Republican you have to believe that thousands of climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data for grant money, while oil executives are victims trying to expose the truth. You have to believe that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are engaged in coordinated voter impersonation fraud, abetted by hundreds of local elections officials in both blue and red areas, and no one has ever leaked it or been caught. You have to believe in a massively coordinated effort to take away guns not to protect children from being shot in schools and movie theaters, but to leave white people defenseless in a race war or implement a Stalinist state tyranny. You have to believe that social services are a racket to keep racial minorities voting for Democrats, rather than an attempt to mitigate the inequities of brutal capital markets in a society riddled with horrific structural racism. And so on.

These (among others) are truly bizarre beliefs, but they are preached from the Fox News pulpit 24-hours-a-day on America’s most-watched cable news network. They have become part of our daily political existence, such that we barely stop to remark anymore on just how outlandish and nonsensical they are when given a moment’s thought. It’s a deeply conspiratorial worldview that depends on its adherents remaining ensconced in a bubble of alternative misinformation.

So it’s not a huge logical leap from these conspiracy theories into even more fantastical QAnon territory. It’s not a big step, for instance, from ridiculously claiming that climate scientists are all lying for grant money–which lacks real credibility as a motive–to speculating that they’re lying for deeper, more nefarious ends. In some ways the Republican tropes actually gain more credibility the more villainous the opponents’ motives are claimed to be. If you’re going to claim that Democrats want to offer universal childcare as an evil scheme to gain power to do vague unspecified things, why not go all the way to claiming that they want to keep patriots subdued so they can harvest babies for adrenochrome? If you’re going to vilify your enemies with absurd claims and keep your followers in a tightly controlled information bubble, why stop at a partially enraptured cable news/AM radio audience? Why not go all the way?

This is why the GOP can’t control QAnon. Once the Republican Party handed over control of its messaging to cable news and radio hosts, and once it began to depend on an alternative universe of conspiracy theories promulgated on social media to prop itself up, it was only a matter of time before these things started to take on a life of their own.

Now we are all paying the price as this toxic cult threatens to infuse American politics with even more extremism, misinformation and violence. But it was the “mainstream” Republican Party and its allies that laid all the groundwork for it.

Expert explains how Trump has exploited our legal infrastructure to advance true fascism in America

August 16, 2020 By Bill Blum, Independent Media Institute

Donald Trump during CNN debate (Photo: Screen capture via video)

The debate over whether Donald Trump is a fascist is no longer confined to a narrow segment of the far left. It is now out in the open. Even mainstream columnists like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg and the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor and influential Democratic politicians, such as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, have come to use the “F” word to describe our 45th commander in chief

Although it is an emotionally loaded and often misused term, fascism is as real today as a political and cultural force, a set of core beliefs, and a mode of governance as it was when Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and declared himself dictator six years later.


Nor is fascism a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Churchwell’s article is aptly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” In it, she offers a working definition of fascism, noting that fascist movements, both past and present in America and abroad, are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” 

These include:

“[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain ‘bloodlines’ over others.”

Anyone who has studied Trump’s campaign rhetoric or watched the brutality of federal law enforcement officers deployed against protesters in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, can plainly see the features at work.

But what about the legal structures that have permitted Trumpian fascism to take hold in a nation known for its resilient democratic institutions and traditions?

Like other fascists before him, Trump’s path to power was made possible not by outright violations of the law, but by fundamental flaws in existing law, embedded in Trump’s case in the U.S. Constitution and key federal statutes that were in place long before he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his initial presidential bid.

These are the loopholes and voids in American democracy that were waiting for a would-be strongman like Trump to exploit. Although there are many such loopholes, Trump has benefitted from nine in particular.


1. The Electoral College

The Founding Fathers who drafted the Constitution were visionaries and revolutionaries. But they were also wealthy white men of property, elitists, and in many instances, slaveholders, who deeply feared the potential “tyranny” of majority rule.

Instead of designing a system of direct democracy that would allow the people to choose their president by a national popular vote, the founders established the Electoral College, which allocates to each state a number of electors equal to its combined (Senate and House) congressional delegation. (The District of Columbia was accorded three elector votes by the 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961.) When Americans go to the polls, they don’t actually elect the president. They vote instead for a slate of state electors, who cast the real votes.

Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Paper No. 68 that entrusting the selection of the president to electors rather than the people would ensure that presidents were chosen by “men most… likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations,” and guarantee “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

History has proven Hamilton and the founders wrong. On no fewer than five occasions, we have installed presidents who won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote: John Quincy Adams in 1824; Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876; Benjamin Harrison in 1888; George W. Bush in 2000; and Donald Trump in 2016.

Trump lost the 2016 popular vote by a greater margin (roughly 2.8 million votes) than any president in U.S. history. His fascism represents a tyranny of the minority unanticipated by the founders, but made possible by the system they devised.


2. The Constitutional Design of the Senate

Under the Constitution, all states are allocated two senators, regardless of population. In 2016, Senate Democrats won far more votes nationally than their Republican counterparts. Nonetheless, the GOP emerged with a solid majority in the upper chamber.

Since his inauguration, Trump has used the Republican-controlled Senate to further minority rule, ramming through two conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and many more appointments to the lower federal bench. Trump also benefited from the GOP’s hold on the Senate in his impeachment trial, securing a quick and easy acquittal. Seeking to protect the president at all times, Senate Republicans blocked any witnesses from being called.

3. Abuse of Executive Orders

Although the Constitution vests Congress with the power to pass legislation, presidents can issue executive orders pursuant to grants of congressional authority, or under their inherent powers. Every American president has issued at least one, dating back to George Washington’s 1794 proclamation aimed at suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. Unless overturned by the courts, executive orders have the force of law.



Ultimately, it’s not the quantity of executive orders that matters, but the quality. If executive orders run afoul of Congress’ law-making powers to a great enough degree, they are a conduit to autocracy.

Among Trump’s most odious mandates are his Muslim travel ban of 2017; his 2018 order establishing a task force to evaluate the “operations and finances” of the beleaguered Post Service; his 2019 order imposing additional sanctions on Iran in the aftermath of his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement; and the order issued this past May, purportedly for “preventing online censorship.” Critics charge the censorship order has nothing to do with free speech, but was motivated by Trump’s desire to exact revenge against Twitter for removing some of his more unhinged, conspiracy-driven posts.

On August 8, Trump announced additional orders designed to break the congressional stalemate over a new stimulus package to combat the economic devastation wrought by COVID-19. The new edicts may look benign at first glance, but they include a directive slashing the $600 per week in enhanced unemployment benefits approved by Congress in March to $400, with cash-strapped states being held responsible for doling out one-quarter of the amount. Another order calls for deferring the Social Security payroll tax, a step that could severely undermine the delicate balance sheet of the Social Security Administration in the middle of a pandemic.

4. The National Emergencies Act

Passed in 1976 as a post-Watergate reform to rein in presidential power, the National Emergencies Act has in practice been a failure, in large part because it doesn’t define what constitutes a national emergency. The act accords the president complete discretion to issue an emergency declaration, as long as the president specifies at least one emergency power contained in an existing federal statute that will be used to address the declared emergency.

In February 2019, Trump invoked the NEA to redirect $2.5 billion in federal funds for construction of his shameful wall along the border with Mexico, citing an obscure section of the United States Code dealing with deployment of the Army’s “Ready Reserve” units. In July 2019, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling decided along ideological lines, overturned a lower-court decision that had blocked the funding transfer. In October 2019, Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill that Congress had passed to repeal the emergency decree.

What emergency will Trump declare next? How about a crackdown on the “fake news” media? A 1934 law still on the books allows the president to shut down or take control of “any facility or station for wire communication” (arguably, the internet in the digital era) upon his proclamation “that there exists a state or threat of war… or other national emergency.”

5. The Scapegoating of Immigrants

The most heartless and dangerous policies adopted thus far by the Trump administration arguably lie in the area of immigration. Nothing says fascism more than dispatching federalized National Guard troops to the border, as Trump did in 2018, or incarcerating undocumented immigrant children in makeshift detention camps, or withholding federal funds from so-called sanctuary states and cities.

Trump’s policies may be especially oppressive, but they haven’t sprung from thin air. In the larger historical context, they fall well within the boundaries of America’s deep-seated nativist traditions. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the “red scares” of the 20th century, the “Operation Wetback” mass roundups of the Eisenhower administration, the expedited deportation hearings instituted by Bill Clinton and the deportation records set by Barack Obama, our immigration laws and policies have been driven by political expediency, paranoia, scapegoating, racism and economic exploitation. Trump has simply taken advantage of them to consolidate and appease his electoral base.

6. The Transformation of the Department of Homeland Security Into a Mobile Paramilitary Force



Since its creation in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has grown to become the third-largest federal agency, with more than 240,000 employees. More than 60,000 DHS employees work as law-enforcement officers assigned to the Border Patrol, the Federal Protective Service and other units.

The DHS operates at the direction of the president. In July, DHS forces were dispatched to Portland, where they bombarded protesters with tear gas and pepper spray, savagely beat protesters, and abducted some in unmarked rented vans. Rather than reprimand the agency for its excesses, Trump has promised to use similar tactics in other cities. He has also threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send the U.S. military to quell protests elsewhere.

7. Abuse of the Pardon Power

The Constitution gives the president broad authority to grant “reprieves and pardons” for federal crimes. Presidents since George Washington have exercised the power, sometimes controversially.

No president has used the power to reward political cronies, misfits and crooks more than Trump. In 2017, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the notorious Arizona sheriff, after he had been convicted in federal court of criminal contempt. In 2018, he pardoned the far-right pundit Dinesh D’Souza, who had pleaded guilty in 2014 to making an illegal campaign contribution. In 2019, he pardoned three U.S. military officers accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. And earlier this year, he commuted the prison sentence of his longtime adviser and associate Roger Stone.

In the manner of a dedicated fascist, Trump has even claimed the “absolute right” to pardon himself if the need ever arose.

8. Eroding Justice Department Independence

No fascist takeover can be complete without the steadfast loyalty of government prosecutors to the nation’s supreme leader. Until the arrival of Trump, every president since Nixon had respected the operational independence of the Department of Justice. The DOJ’s independence, however, is not enshrined in the Constitution or protected by federal statutory law. It is a norm that the president, as head of the executive branch, can breach at will.

Trump has worked hard to break the DOJ. When he fired Jeff Sessions, his first attorney general, in November 2018, he replaced him with Bill Barr, a hardline proponent of the “unitary executive,” a theory of governance that espouses a wide-ranging expansion of presidential power. Since then, as Intercept columnist James Risen has charged, Barr has “turned the Justice Department into a law firm with one client: Donald Trump.”



9. Voter Suppression

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Trump’s new appointee as postmaster general, a former donor named Louis DeJoy, is shutting down local post offices and reducing overtime pay for postal workers under the guise of cost-cutting to sabotage the agency that will be charged with delivering a critical mass of mail-in ballots in the fall. Combined with other suppression techniques that are already in place—strict voter ID laws, voting roll purges, the closing of polling stations, etc.—a grand plan is taking shape to cast doubt on the vote tallies in crucial swing states.

As the plan unfolds and the election’s legitimacy is called into question, Trump and his allies can be expected to summon the Supreme Court to ride to their rescue in a replay of Bush v. Gore, the infamous judicial coup d’état that handed the 2000 presidential election to the GOP. Alternatively, Trump could try to push the election to the House of Representatives, where the outcome would be determined according to the arcane procedures of the 12th Amendment.

Whether Trump can pull off such a scheme remains to be seen. One thing, however, is certain: If Trump wins another term, the fascism we’re seeing in America today will pale in comparison to the fascism we’ll see tomorrow.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.


Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.

Huawei’s license in the US expires, may be a problem for rural networks and Android phones

By Rei Padla-August 17, 2020



Back in February, before the rest of the world were put on lockdown, the U.S. Commerce Department gave Huawei a 45-day reprieve. It was continued but it has officially lapsed which could bring problems to the operation of rural telecoms networks in the country. The reprieve officially expired last week Thursday which could pose some issues on any business with the Chinese OEM. The Trump administration has labeled Huawei a security threat that’s why the company couldn’t set up shop stateside.

The US trade ban has affected a lot of companies that have been doing business with Huawei. It’s been over a year and nothing has changed. We highly doubt if the US government will change its mind. It’s up to the American firms that supply tech and products to Huawei to make adjustments. The temporary general license allows US companies to work with Huawei.

One important reprieve was for US software providers to send updates to Huawei. This way, the company could still send them to customers via Huawei devices or wireless network equipment. The said license has expired recently as confirmed by the Commerce Department. The license is important as it provides “an opportunity for users of Huawei devices and telecommunications providers to continue to temporarily operate such devices and existing networks while hastening the transition to alternative suppliers”, ironically, as per the Commerce Department.

Mainly, the smaller rural networks will be affected. Most of them depend on Huawei. They use Huawei because they are inexpensive but the government is now requiring them to replace their Huawei network equipment. This follows shortly after the FCC called Huawei and ZTE as threats.

The networks don’t need to replace their equipment right away. They must wait for money from the federal government. Well, there is no money yet according to Pine Telephone Company’s General Manager Jerry Whisenhunt. He also said, “The longer they wait the more likely it is that we’re going to have problems.”

Other problems may include Google not being able to send software updates to Huawei phones that still run Android. The reprieve given earlier was the same one that allowed the rural networks to continue working with the Chinese company.

Google is still allowed to work with Huawei but only for models released to the public on or before May 16, 2019. It’s still not clear if a reprieve will still be given. Let’s wait and see.

How Kamala Harris helped secure marriage equality and officiate the first same-sex weddings

THE INDEPENDENT 15/8/2020 by James Besanvalle in news

Kamala Harris, the newly-announced Democratic candidate for Vice President of the United States, has a strong track record when it comes to marriage equality.

On 12 February 2004, San Fransisco mayor Gavin Newsom declared the California Constitution's equal protection clause gave him authority to grant same-sex marriage licenses.

At the time, Harris was the district attorney of San Francisco and described what happened next in her memoir, The Truth We Hold:

There were throngs of people lined up around the block waiting to get in [to San Francisco City Hall]. They were counting down the minutes before a government would finally recognise their right to marry whomever they loved.

I got out of my car and walked up the steps of City Hall where I bumped into a city official. ‘Kamala, come and help us,’ she said, a glowing smile on her face. ‘We need more people to perform the marriages.'

I was delighted to be a part of it. I was quickly sworn in along with numerous city officials. We stood together performing marriages in the hallway, crowded into every nook and cranny of City Hall.

That elation was short-lived.

After two anti-marriage equality groups filed actions in San Francisco Superior Court, the city was instructed to halt the issuing of marriage licences to same-sex couples on 11 March.

And on 12 August that same year, the California Supreme Court voided all of the licenses that had been issued – amounting to around 4,000 same-sex couples.

During her tenure as district attorney, she's credited with establishing a hate crimes unit to investigate and prosecute anti-LGBTQ+ violence, as well as organising a conference in 2006 to ban the "gay and transgender panic defence". California eventually became the first state in the US to ban the latter.

But marriage equality was an uphill battle.

On 16 June 2008, the Supreme Court of California found that barring same-sex couples from marriage violated the state's Constitution. But on 5 November that same year, there was another major setback.

California voted to pass Proposition 8 – a law that essentially re-banned same-sex marriage and affirmed:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Harris ran for the role of attorney general of California in 2010 and made opposing Prop 8 a key issue.

She described in her memoir:

It quickly became a central issue in the campaign... I made clear that I had no intention of spending a penny of the attorney general’s office resources defending Prop 8.

She narrowly won and subsequently followed through on her vow not to defend it.

After a series of fervent legal battles, Harris lent her support to the cause by filing a friend-of-the-court brief calling for Prop 8 to be struck down in 2013.

Then success – the US Supreme Court struck down Prop 8 on 28 June 2013 and ruled that same-sex marriages were able to resume in California.

After the announcement, Harris received a call from the Human Rights Campaign’s president Chad Griffin, asking if she would perform the first official ceremony for same-sex couple, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier.

According to her memoir, she responded:

Of course, I would love to. Nothing would make me more proud.
There was a huge crowd gathered to witness the ceremony take place, by the time Harris had made her way to City Hall.

She recalled:

Kris and Sandy arrived soon after beaming and ready to go. ‘Congratulations,’ I exclaimed as I hugged them both. They had been through so much for so long.

She then performed the ceremony, to a triumphant crowd.

Unfortunately, the day didn’t go off without a hitch though.

A clerk in Los Angeles was reportedly hesitant about issuing marriage licences because he wanted the all clear from an official first.

So Harris phoned him up immediately and directed him to do so:

On 26 June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled marriage equality legal across all 50 states in the US.

Since then, Harris has fought for other LGBTQ+ rights, including introducing the Do No Harm Act in 2018 to prevent the use of religious beliefs to be used as a means to discriminate against the community.

She’s also previously condemned the Trump administration’s removal of LGBTQ+ health-related information on federal websites.

It’s not all positive though. Harris has come under fire for denying gender confirmation surgery to trans prisoners when she was California's Attorney General, as well as her track record on criminal justice.

Journalist Lyz Lenz called out Harris on the former, asking last year:

During your time as Attorney General in California, you did send a brief seeking to deny gender affirmation surgery for trans inmates. You stated that at the time you were just enforcing the existing law. But with this history, how can trans people trust that you’ll advocate for them and not just enforce discriminatory laws?

Harris responded:

When that case came up, I had clients, and one of them was the California Department of Corrections. It was their policy. When I learned about what they were doing, behind the scenes, I got them to change the policy.

The US election is scheduled to be held on 3 November.  

Sorry, believers: Skeptics say there are rational explanations for military pilots’ UFO videos
SORRY SKEPTICS BUT IF YOU WERE RIGHT THE NAVY WOULD HAVE SAID SO

August 17, 2020
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon- Commentary


The Pentagon announced Thursday that it is creating a task force to investigate UFO sightings. Though the notion that the military is investigating UFOs sounds like a fringe conspiracy theorist’s ultimate redemption, the military’s actions are far from preposterous. That’s because their own trusted soldiers have credibly encountered UFOs while piloting military aircraft.

The Pentagon’s footage from these sightings, which has been made public, depicts objects zooming quickly through the sky, as recorded by military pilots. Though these objects fit the technical definition of a UFO — meaning an unidentified flying object — they may not adhere to the folk understanding of “UFO” as synonymous with an extraterrestrial spacecraft. That’s because there isn’t exactly any evidence that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin, or that they defy any existing laws of physics that might hint at their development by a more scientifically advanced species.

“To understand the videos, all you need to do is ask any fighter pilot familiar with the FLIR camera system,” Brian Dunning, a professional scientific skeptic and podcaster, told Salon by email. “What looks like great speed and wild maneuvers is just a common optical illusion combined with the effects of the FLIR’s gimbal and glare filter.” FLIR cameras, short for forward-looking infrared cameras, are capable of seeing slightly into the infrared spectrum, meaning that heat sources light up on FLIR camera footage.

Dunning zeroed in on a released video that appears to show a bat-winged shaped craft, noting that “the object you’re seeing is a single point of heat from an unidentified plane, probably a distant commercial jet, flying away from the F-18. The camera is looking out the side of the F-18 which is speeding past nearby clouds, making the object appear to be moving relative to the clouds.”

He added, “Its bat-wing shape is how the FLIR’s glare filter always depicts single bright points (there are plenty of examples of this on YouTube), and whenever the object appears to turn, this is simply the FLIRs gimbal rotating to keep the target in view as the F-18 maneuvers. The other videos also have similarly prosaic explanations.

Timothy Caulfield, a law professor at the University of Alberta who also hosts a TV series that debunks pseudoscience (titled “A User’s Guide to Cheating Death”), explained to Salon that there are a number of potentially innocuous explanations — many of them involving military or other highly secretive scientific experiments — that get ignored due to sensationalism. 

“I get why people are fascinated by this topic. It’s exciting, it’s intriguing, it’s mysterious,” Caulfield said. “But the idea that these things are UFOs and alien sightings, and that there is alien material left on our planet, is scientifically implausible and highly unlikely. It’s an Occam’s Razor story. I think there is probably a more straightforward explanation, but we will just never know with the deep uncertainty. People want answers.” 

He drew particular attention to how the pilots that spotted these UFOs may have inadvertently fanned the flames of conspiracy theorists.

“When people look at those kinds of videos and the reaction of the pilots, for example, I think that’s often also used to give them more credibility with these expert pilots, often military pilots, commenting on the behavior of the shifts,” Caulfield explained. “I’m not a physicist, I’m not an engineer. I can understand why people are intrigued. They don’t know what this object is and it’s moving in a manner that seems impossible given our current technology.”

Alexander Wendt, an international relations professor at Ohio State University who has become a prominent amateur ufologist, pointed to the reactions of the military pilots as a sign that these new UFOs should be taken seriously.

“I challenge anybody to do better than the Navy to explain what’s in those videos. If the Navy couldn’t do it…” Wendt told Salon, before adding that “they had every reason to want this off their plate.”

As Wendt pointed out, “I think what’s unique about these Navy videos is that the whole issue arose from the pilots… I think the upset pilots is really a key thing. These guys are the experts on what’s in the sky. They have thousands of hours of experience flying up there. You see some of the interviews with these pilots and they think something is going on, and they were the ones that pushed this whole issue to the front.”

Another Ohio State University professor, political scientist Thomas Wood, opened up to Salon about why people embrace UFO conspiracy theories.

“If you look at the data on public opinion on this, it is really sort of incredible,” Wood explained. (A Gallup poll last year found that 33 percent of Americans believe that some UFO sightings were caused by alien visitation; a YouGov poll last month found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government would hide UFO evidence from the public.) “The American public fascination with UFOs is one of the very durable conspiracy theories in the American public’s imagination. Most conspiracy theories may become popular and then quiet quickly — for instance, the Barack Obama was born in Kenya theory, the American government planned the 9/11 terrorist attack theory. The UFO conspiracy theory is one of those that just sort of stuck around.”

Dunning was quite cynical about the reasons for people believing in UFOs.

“Two words: Sensationalism sells,” Dunning emailed Salon. “Nobody is excited about the artifacts of the FLIR glare filter; everyone is excited about the prospect of the Pentagon hiding the ‘truth about aliens.'”

He added, “Humans are hardwired for anecdotal thinking. Our brains gravitate toward the simple and the desirable, and away from the complicated and the boring. The people in the business of selling TV programming are well aware of this, and that’s why we see UFOs, ghosts, psychics, and miracle cures dominating pop culture.”

Many famous people claim to have encountered either UFOs or aliens, from singers Elvis Presley and Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge and President Jimmy Carter. They were able to have successful careers despite the stigma associated with such an alleged experience, though many other believers were not.

Earlier this year, the TV series “Unsolved Mysteries” devoted an episode to a group of people from a small town in western Massachusetts who claim they encountered a UFO in 1969. They described being socially rejected, viciously bullied, and in one case even harassed to the point where they moved away. It makes sense why they wouldn’t go to the police or the local press at the time with their story. Many other reports of UFO sightings and encounters follow the same pattern — those who come forward suffer for doing so. As one of the people in the episode puts it, the town devolved from “Norman Rockwell to Salvador Dali” as public opinion and un-visited citizens turned against the purported witnesses.